Knowra Patricia Hill Collins Patricia Hill Collins Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist whose work examines how race, gender, class, and other relations of power shape knowledge, identity, and social institutions.
Black feminist thought : A body of ideas and social analysis developed by Black women that centers their experiences and knowledge. Collins made this tradition a systematic framework for understanding Black women's knowledge and resistance.
Outsider within : A social position of partial inclusion that can provide distinctive insight into an institution or dominant group. Collins used Black women's position in white households and institutions to explain situated critical knowledge.
Sojourner Truth : A nineteenth-century abolitionist and women's rights advocate known for speeches including “Ain't I a Woman?” Collins discusses Truth's speech as a foundational expression of Black women's political thought.
Epistemic injustice : A wrong done to people in their capacity as knowers, including through credibility deficits or gaps in shared understanding. Collins's account of whose knowledge counts illuminates how power produces unequal credibility and understanding.
Intersectionality : An analytical framework for examining how interlocking social categories shape power, identity, and experience. Collins developed intersectional analysis through work on overlapping systems of oppression.
Black sexual politics : The contested politics of sexuality, gender, and power in Black communities and in wider society. Collins applies intersectional analysis to sexual representation, identity, and social regulation.
Anna Julia Cooper : An American educator and writer whose work addressed Black women's education, race, and gender in the late nineteenth century. Cooper's scholarship and activism exemplify the intellectual tradition Collins traces in Black feminist thought.
Situated knowledge : Knowledge understood as shaped by the social and material position from which it is produced. Her work makes the social location of knowledge central to evaluating claims of objectivity.
Matrix of domination : Collins's framework for analyzing how interlocking systems of power operate across institutions, groups, and individuals. It names the structure of power that organizes her account of intersecting oppressions.
Hip-hop feminism : A feminist approach that engages hip-hop culture and its representations of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Collins examines popular culture as a site where gendered and racialized meanings are made and contested.
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